“Transverse or longitudinal?” Amanda asked. She’d left the equipment hatch and was dragging herself into the cage.
“Transverse,” Carlo replied.
“You know what that means,” Amanda said. “We recorded Zosima’s body instructing itself to undergo biparous fission—and now we’ve fooled Benigna’s body into thinking it’s told itself exactly the same thing.”
“This is not fission!” Carlo insisted. He summoned Amanda closer and let her feel Benigna’s unchanged head and upper chest.
Macaria said, “We only replayed the signals from the three lower probes—and nothing from the very start of the process. If there’s a single message that sets fission in train, I doubt we’ve reproduced it.”
“So if this isn’t fission,” Amanda demanded, “when does it stop?” A prominent dark ridge had risen across the full width of the arborine’s torso.
Carlo probed one end of the ridge, following it down toward the plinth. “It isn’t encircling the body,” he said. “It turns around and runs longitudinally.” He prodded the fleshy wall, trying to get a sense of its deeper geometry. “I think it’s avoiding the gut.” During ordinary fission, in voles at least, the whole digestive tract closed up and disappeared well before any partitions formed. If that hadn’t happened to Benigna, perhaps the process that was building the partition had steered away from the unexpected structure—guided as much by the details of its environment as any fixed notion as to its own proper shape.
“How much does the brain need to spell out, and how much does the flesh in the blastula manage for itself?” Macaria wondered.
“The brain’s resorbed quite late,” Carlo said.
“That doesn’t mean it’s controlling everything, right up to that moment,” Macaria countered.
Amanda reached past Carlo and put a hand on Benigna’s rigid belly. “If we’ve told half her body that it’s undergoing fission, does it really need any more instructions? What if it’s taken it upon itself to finish what it’s started?”
Carlo felt sick. “Should we euthanize her?” he asked. He was not sentimental, but he wasn’t going to torture this animal for no reason.
“Why?” Macaria replied, bemused. “Do you think she’s in pain?”
Carlo examined Benigna’s face. The muscles remained slack and her eyes did not respond when he moved his fingers; he had no reason to believe that she’d regained consciousness. But his father had told him stories from the sagas of men accidentally buried alive, and the mere thought of that still filled him with dread. What was fission, if not the female equivalent of death? Would it not be as horrifying—even for an arborine—to wake on the far side of a border whose crossing ought to have extinguished all thought?
Amanda looked torn, but she sided with Macaria. “Let her live, for as long as she’s not suffering. We need to know if this will go to completion.”
The misshapen partition was thickening. Carlo fought down his revulsion and explored its full extent. After crossing the torso then turning at the sides to follow the body’s axis, the dark ridge closed up on itself at the back of the arborine’s thighs, a few scants clear of the anus. The implied excision was potentially survivable; the blastula had not claimed any part of Benigna’s flesh that would normally be immutable.
“It’s lucky we fed her up,” Macaria said. “Or there wouldn’t be much to work with.”
“Are the limbs included?” Amanda wondered.
“Good point.” Macaria prodded each of Benigna’s lower arms in turn. “Their skin hasn’t hardened.” She ran her fingers up toward the torso, searching for the boundary. “Oh!”
“What?” From the sound of her voice Carlo was reluctant to touch the spot himself.
“If I’m right we’ll see it soon enough,” Macaria replied.
Over the next few lapses, two more dark ridges appeared at the top of the thighs. For some reason the flesh beyond was as unacceptable to the blastula as the digestive tract.
“That seems wasteful,” Amanda complained.
“It’s avoiding the bifurcation,” Carlo guessed. “At this stage there wouldn’t usually be any maternal limbs around, so whatever follows probably requires a convex mass of flesh.” If the partition had veered toward the front of the thighs in the first place the limbs could have been excluded with less drastic consequences—but this was a blind process, robbed of its ordinary context, not something nature had ever had a chance to hone for the sake of Benigna’s welfare.
“Next time we should arrange for the subject to resorb them first,” Macaria suggested.
The blastula—or half-blastula—had found its borders now. The volume it enclosed was small, but not absurdly so: perhaps a sixth of Benigna’s flesh.
“Do you remember the story of Amata and Amato?” Macaria asked.
“Vaguely,” Amanda replied. Carlo knew it well, but he wasn’t in the mood to offer a recitation.
“The two of them are in the forest looking for food,” Macaria synopsized, “when an arborine chases them and gobbles up Amato. But years later, Amata has her revenge. She catches the arborine and swallows it whole—and it turns out her co’s been alive all the time, trapped inside the arborine. All she has to do to bring him back is separate him from her own body, the way she might extrude a new limb.”
“The moral being that you should never try to learn biology from the sagas,” Amanda concluded.
“A good rule in general,” Macaria agreed. “But that story does make me wonder. If we could bring this on with just a fragment of the usual signaling, the same kind of thing might happen occasionally in nature.”
“You think that story’s about a partially formed blastula?” Carlo asked incredulously.
Macaria said, “If the ancestors ever did see such a thing, even if they understood what it was they might not have chosen to describe it that way. A female’s body gives rise to a new life, without fission. What kind of incendiary nonsense is that? Better to make the new life an old one, and come up with a story about her swallowing the monster who swallowed her co.”
Carlo wasn’t interested in scouring the sagas for dubious crypto-biological clues. What mattered now was deciphering the language being spoken right in front of them.
“We’ve come close to enforcing biparity,” he said. In his shock over Benigna’s transformation he’d almost lost sight of that crucial point. “It was the signal from the tape that established the partition’s geometry, not the female’s mass. If we’d played back all six recordings, we might have triggered an ordinary biparous fission.”
No one disputed his reasoning, but his colleagues did not seem as pleased by this conclusion as he was. The idea of inserting six hardstone tubes into a woman’s body fell a long way short of the promise of splicing the signals into an influence that could be written painlessly on the skin in infrared—and in either case, it wasn’t clear how the male could be integrated into the process. If fission was initiated by the co, could the signals from a light player still intervene to set the number of offspring?
Carlo glanced down at Benigna; the tops of her thighs were atrophying, the gray skin puckering as the flesh below parted from the blastula wall. He checked her ocular response, but she remained mercifully insensate. This was a more severe amputation than his own, but he hadn’t been shielded from that ordeal by a tranquilizing drug. More than the injuries themselves it was the context that made him recoil from her plight.
But what would the context mean to Benigna? She might have formed a notion of childbirth after witnessing it among her friends; she might even have reached a clear-eyed expectation of sharing their fate. But would it actually distress her to find that she’d given birth with that expectation unfulfilled? However powerful the instincts that would have led her willingly to the usual outcome, it did not necessarily follow that she’d be troubled in the least by events taking a different course.